iKnow: See what your Mac knows about you

macOS builds a knowledge graph about the person who uses it: who you know, how it decided those people are related to you, who you write to and how often, whose faces recur in your photos, where you might be next. Check out the write up.

Apple documents very little of this. The daemon that builds the graph gets a one-line man page, and there is no user-facing account of what it stores or what it infers. iKnow is a look under the hood: a small web app that opens the graph on your own Mac and shows you what is in it, what was recorded, what was inferred, and which other parts of the system read it.

What if I told you that every Mac since 2022 ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you: who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, with whom, what you do and when.

This graph is built on device by cross-referencing pretty much everything on the machine: Contacts, Calendar, Photos, Messages, Mail, location, Screen Time and a long tail of behavioral signals. And, more importantly, it is held as a queryable store that LLMs retrieve from (allegedly). Would you believe me?

iKnow: See what your Mac knows about you

kunnen die daemons uit?